


Haunt Me

by battle_cat



Series: Fury Road Ficlets [11]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Introspection, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-31 01:35:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8558110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: She feels her watching, sometimes.





	

She feels her watching, sometimes. Usually after a battle, while she’s scrubbing blood and viscera off her skin, picking bone chips out of the joint of a metal finger. You stop noticing the gore after thousands of days of this, except for the fact that dried blood gets infernally itchy after a while.

_No unnecessary killing._

At first it had been _No killing,_ and Furiosa didn’t know where Angharad had come from or how she had ended up in the Vault, but she had laughed out loud at the thought that someone could have lived this long in the Wasteland with that idea in their head.

_We’re not like them,_ Angharad had said, but Furiosa was not sure she was included in that _we._ Because she remembered the way Angharad had looked at her when she’d first stepped into the Vault, the icy disdain, and it was the same way Angharad had looked at Joe.

_Retaliate first._

Her initiate mother had taught her that one, and in the Citadel she’d clung to it. In a fight you didn’t have time for philosophy. The world was not set up in your favor. Strike first, strike hard, and finish the job. Pull the trigger before they can get their hands on you.

_One man, one bullet._

Thousands of days of surviving, taking a knife to the greywater pits on wash days, fighting for the top bunk in the War Boy barracks because having to climb meant she might hear an attacker coming, beating the tar out of anyone who so much as looked at her wrong, growling with blood in her teeth until she earned a reputation as too kamikrazy to be worth messing with. Always being the best, the bloodiest, shaming the other Imperators with her ferocity, until she was valued enough that they had to at least tolerate her if not respect her.

_No unnecessary killing._

She’d almost killed Max. She would have killed Nux, if the Wife who’d never learned to be afraid of her hadn’t stayed her hand. Both of them had been necessary. Both of them had been needed. How many potential allies had she put a bullet in because she couldn’t take the risk, hesitation was death, she needed to make them afraid of her?

She tries not to think about these things while she scrapes brain matter off leather and feels Angharad’s gaze burning into the back of her neck as if the woman is standing just behind her shoulder.

_We keep moving._

Her Mothers had taught her to shoot first and shoot true. But the Green Place had also welcomed trusted men, allies, traders, wandering bed-mates. And it had taken in broken women and starveling children without question, without needing to know what value they could produce. The Citadel is starting to do the same.

She is supposed to be the bridge between the two worlds, but sometimes it feels like she’s just clung to the worst of both of them, and she doesn’t know how to release it, not when the world outside their towers is still full of fire and blood.

The problem is that you don’t always know, who can be trusted and who needs a bullet in the medulla, and there are always far more of the latter than the former, and you only have to guess wrong once.

She is alive and the Citadel is theirs and their enemies are at bay because she is the sort of person who pulls the trigger. 

Around her the women are growing stronger, less fearful, and the men are growing softer, learning to think for themselves, and that is as it should be. It is as Angharad would have wanted. And if she has to be hard so that they can be soft, well, maybe that’s what she’s best at anyway.


End file.
